


Because the world is cruel and promises are broken

by ideservetobeloved



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Angst, Dean Has a Daughter, Dean Misses Sam, Dean is a little traumatised, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Memories, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, Sam and Dean are an art piece, Sam never got out of the cage btw, always a slut for that, and they are in love, but more like platonic, if that makes sense, kind of, lots of feelings, so much, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 16:24:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6914575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ideservetobeloved/pseuds/ideservetobeloved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When her father is drunk, he says 'I used to have a brother, you know', and gets a faraway look in his eyes. She often asks him about it but he always just stays silent for a long time, eventually gets up and leaves the room, so she just stops because one time she sees him silently crying in the kitchen afterwards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Because the world is cruel and promises are broken

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, lovelies, I hope you're having a wonderful day :)  
> I don't know why I wrote this, I just got an idea and I had to write it down... I apologize for any mistakes beforehand, I don't have a beta. If someone is interested, please contact me!  
> I hope you like this and I would love some feedback xx
> 
> My Tumblr: [weyheytheyregay](http://weyheytheyregay.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Title taken from Sisters Of Mercy - Some Kind Of Stranger

When her father is drunk, he says 'I used to have a brother, you know', and gets a faraway look in his eyes. She often asks him about it but he always just stays silent for a long time, eventually gets up and leaves the room, so she just stops because one time she sees him silently crying in the kitchen afterwards.

She asks her mother about it once who just brushes it off and tells her that it doesn’t matter, because that was then and now it hurts her dad to think about it. She even asks her big brother Ben, even though she’s at that age where big siblings are the most annoying thing in the world, but he just tells her not to worry about it.

But she does worry about it, because how can she not when thinking about his brother makes her father so sad every time? She thinks maybe he died, but her mother’s parents died a few years ago as well and mom is never that sad about them. Well, of course her mom is sad. (She tries to imagine how it must be, not having your parents there anymore. She can’t, not matter how much she tries.) But her mother never gets this weird look in her eyes when someone mentions them, like something so horrible and crushing happened, you are afraid thinking about it could make you come apart at the seams.

She is a smart young girl, she loves reading books about riddles and mysteries, and she dreams of being a detective one day, so it doesn’t take long for her to go investigating by herself. She does her best to ignore the overwhelming feeling of guilt that overcomes her when she begins looking through her father’s things when he isn’t home. It’s pulling at her, tugging at her hair and trying to slap her hands away from the boxes and folders and cases piled in the back of the closet but she is stubborn, and soon the guilt is not a problem anymore.

After some time and after some discoveries she thinks she has at least found the name of the mystery brother. There are photos in one of the boxes, old and tatty pictures that seem two centuries old. There’s an old guy with a beard and a funny hat who sits in a wheelchair in some of them, and another guy who seems a little younger than the other one, with steel grey hair and scruffy stubble, eyes hard as little black rocks, yet kind at the same time, and there’s also a woman with blonde hair and soft green eyes who looks like warm embraces and comfy blankets and home.

But there is one person who appears more often than anyone. He seems very young, younger than any of the others, almost a boy still. There are lots of photos with him and her dad when he was younger. She knows what her dad looked like when he was younger, because there is an old photo of him, her mom and her brother standing on the mantelpiece in the living room. But she always thought he looked somehow sad on this photo, even though it is at Ben’s birthday party and the other two are beaming like two individual suns.

She has never seen her father as happy as on those photos with the young-man-almost-boy who has shiny brown hair that she would really like to touch, and warm eyes in the same color as the woman in the other pictures. Whenever he is with him, her dad is smiling so hard that there are crinkles all around his eyes, and sometimes he also laughs, head thrown back and mouth wide open. He looks really pretty in those photos, and she wished he would laugh like that sometimes, but whenever he laughs now it’s a shadow of his old smile at most which makes her a little sad.

She wants to tell him that she wants him to laugh like that again because it makes him look very beautiful and kind, but of course she can’t because then she would have to tell him that she has been going through his stuff and she is sure he won’t like that.

The boy has to be her dad’s brother. She can see it in the shape and the color of their eyes, in the corners of their mouths, in their hands, in the way they laugh. They look like part of the same piece of art, not really complete without one another.

On some of the photos there are names scribbled hastily at the back in black marker. _Sam and Dean, 1997. Sam and Dean, 2005. Sam and Dean, 2008._ Like a true piece of art, a painting or a sketch, _Sam and Dean_ is the name and after that there’s the year it was made. Like someone saw their beauty, noticed the way they made each other complete, and decided to share it with the world.

She knows Dean is the name of her father (her mother sometimes calls him that), which means Sam has to be the name of the other man. It’s a fitting name, she thinks. If she would encounter this man on the street and talk to him or even just look into his eyes for a brief moment as he passes by, she would think of him as a Sam. Sam sounds like a name for her father’s brother.

She can understand why her dad is sad about his brother. If she had someone so in tune with her, someone who could make her laugh like that, she would probably be sad as well if that person wasn’t there anymore.

There’s also a box with letters, tons and tons of letters, each and every one addressed at Sam. When she finds the box there’s the guilt again, whispering in her ear, _bad, bad, bad_ but she pushes it away. At first she thinks it is weird that her dad has all these letters, because they’re all from him and she doesn’t get why he keeps lots of letters and never sends one.

The box is quite small, a slim wooden case that she can hide under her hoodie while she quietly makes her way across the corridor to her room hoping she doesn’t wake her mother from her after-lunch nap. Finally reaching the safety of her room, she pulls the curtains closed because it creates a more mysterious atmosphere, and starts reading.

Pretty soon it becomes clear that the letters were never really intended to be sent at all, they sound more like a diary. She has a diary as well, one she got for her last birthday. It’s black with golden letters on the front that spell the words _MY DIARY_ , delicate lines to write on inside and little dates on top of each page to mark the days, and it looks very grown up. She tries to write in it every day, but most of the time she can’t think of anything, so there are only three or four days filled in. Maybe Sam is her dad’s diary.

There are lots of phrases that give the impression that Sam is in fact dead, even though it sounds more like he’s gone away somewhere. But not away like Ben’s real dad went away, who lives in the same town but in a different house and takes Ben with him for golf every so often and sometimes has a cup of coffee with her parents in their front yard. More like he’s gone to another country or another continent or another world.

There’s lots of stuff in those letters that she doesn’t understand. Stuff about someone named Lucifer and a cage, and about a place where her dad went that he calls ‘hell’ (it must have been really, really horrible because he rarely talks about it), a lot about ghosts and vampires (if she is being honest, it scares her a bit even though she doesn’t understand because _everyone_ knows those things aren’t real) and also about a demon with yellow eyes and Sam dying and her father making a deal with someone to bring him back.

She doesn’t think that actually works, because maybe then he could have made a deal two months ago when her guinea pig died because she was so sad about it and she’s sure he would have done it, if just to stop her from crying. Or he could have made a deal when that pigeon crashed against the big window of their living room, because it was so cute and it didn’t deserve to die just because of their window. Well, maybe it did work but he could only use it once. Or he forgot how to do it.

There’s a lot of sad stuff, too, things that make her tear up more than once. She didn’t know someone could be sad enough to write these sorts of things, and it almost makes her wish she never found the words in her hands, black ink carelessly and messy scribbled across blank pages that almost look yellow already because they’ve been touched so many times. Sometimes the ink is a bit smudged; it looks like tears and the thought of her dad crying while writing those sentences that she is reading right now makes her heart ache and her eyes look away for a moment because she can’t stand the thought.

The letters have tiny dates scribbled in the top corners of the paper, almost like in her diary, just way messier. They date back to 2010 and stop around the time she was born. Sometimes there’s only a day between them, sometimes two months. In the last letter her dad writes that he misses Sam, and that he doesn’t want to let go but he knows he has to and that maybe this child will be a fresh start. (The child is probably her.)

She reads all of them, every single one, until late in the evening, and afterwards she feels so bad that she begins to cry and rushes to stuff them back in the box and slams it shut so hurriedly that she almost hurts her fingers. She can’t help but feel like she just invaded her father’s personal space in the worst way possible. He surely did not want her to read any of those letters, they were private and not meant for her eyes, perhaps not for anybody’s, and she feels like a thief, a criminal.

Her dad is home from work now; she can hear him going around downstairs and an iron fist of guilt clamps her heart cold and heavy. Before she can over think her decision, she takes the box and hurries downstairs, running into him at the end of the corridor. She looks up, tears still streaming over her face. He wants to ask what’s wrong and then he sees the box in her hands, her childish, clumsy hands that look so weak and tiny compared to his.

He stills and just looks at her, and she can’t stop crying because she thinks, _he’s mad, he’s so mad, I’m so sorry, please don’t hate me_. She can see the anger boiling in his eyes and underneath his skin and she is almost afraid of him. But then all of a sudden his eyes just turn dark and sad and he starts to cry.

She is struck dumb by shock and actually stops crying herself because that’s not what she expected. Seeing her father cry, seeing this strong, powerful man that she has looked up to her entire life break down in front of her is like watching her whole world crumble at her feet but she can’t do anything, her hands are empty and she feels so helpless, the tears are flowing again but this time not because of guilt and shame.

She gets down on her knees and tries to comfort him _because he’s crying and she doesn’t know what to do_ , wraps her arms around her dad and softly strokes his back, the back of his head, his forehead, his shoulders.

They sit there for a long time, silent and crying, and finally he begins to talk… He tells her about things that she could have never dreamt about, about actual ghosts and vampires and werewolves and demons and angels and about the devil. And he tells her about his brother, about Sam, about everything she read in his letters and so much more, and suddenly everything makes sense.

And he doesn’t stop talking (though they move to the sofa because that’s way more comfortable), there are so many stories to tell, stories about Sam’s laugh, Sam’s hair, Sam’s eyes, Sam’s flaws, Sam’s perfections, Sam, Sam, Sam, and she is amazed by this man that she never met, just by the stories she is told, she is so proud of him and she wants to tell him that he did right, that there is still someone who loves him, someone who hasn’t forgotten even though everyone else has, and it is her dad right here in front of her.

At some point her mother comes into the room and joins them without asking too many questions, she just listens and smiles and laughs with them, and then Ben comes in too, and she feels better than she has in a long time.

It feels warm and safe and loved, and the feeling doesn’t go away, even when her dad asks her to give him the box with the letters and tells his family to follow him outside. There are still remains of the campfire that they had yesterday with some of the neighbours. Her father lights it again (which takes a while because it is cold and rainy outside, but she isn’t freezing for some reason) and then he opens the box, takes out every single letter one by one and throws them into the flames crackling weakly to their feet.

Nobody says a word, nobody asks why because they all know. He doesn’t want to leave Sam behind, he wants to remember him and the times they had together. Hold on to his brother who sacrificed himself to save the whole world, and he wants to do it without those dark times of the aftermath hovering over him and coloring his memories of Sam in a way he doesn’t want them to.

And while she stands there with her family, she thinks that some day she wants to love and cherish someone as much as her father loves and cherishes Sam. 


End file.
